History Is Not the Past

White Flight at Wells Avenue in North St. Louis

The series of slides (above) sometimes loads a bit slow…

Once it loads, you can resize the window till the whole image appears on the screen — then flip through the series of 8 slides.

After tracing the story of my grandfather and his abandoned house on Wells Avenue, I organized another class to conduct further research. We found that wealth moves in and out of the city, but it is always attached to whiteness. I’m interested in the ways urban revitalization strategies prioritize spatial categories (geographic areas) over racial categories (pockets of affluence). See above.

My students’ work is here, on this blog. We followed the families who moved in and out of other houses on the Wells Avenue block, to see which families were able to accumulate wealth from the properties, and how, exactly, it happened, in each case.

To learn more about this neighborhood today, visit the Better Family Life website. BFL is a local community development corporation.